Jimdo Review

Intro

Founded in 2007, Jimdo offers website, store and blog building services. With over 20 million sites to date – Jimdo has quickly become an important player in the website builder space.

Where the platform excels, is building sites for entrepreneurs, small business owners, musicians, photographers, offering a platform designed to accommodate both the artistic and analytical-minded. Another key feature of Jimdo is its online store, there are some, 200,000 shops that have been created and are still managed with the platform.

Similarly to Wix, with the release of its ADI, Jimdo has the capability of building a website based on users answering a few simple questions. This is done with the assistance of Artificial Design Intelligence technology which uses AI to quickly and create a professional-looking website.

Templates

One of the first things we should mention about Jimdo’s templates is in reference to look. Each of its templates is modern looking and very customizable. They are designed for a business owner who wants something a bit more avant-garde as well as highly functional.

The website builder’s templates are not only great-looking, they don’t come with a huge learning curve. Jimdo offers some 40 templates and the ability to create 100 variations of templates from its template editor.

Each Jimdo template is split into 4 main categories:

Business

Personal

Portfolio

Store

When you select your template in the template editor, you can pick ‘Variations.’ Choosing this option will lead you to a slightly different version of your original template.

For assistance with selecting a template, Jimdo created its Template Filter, enabling you to narrow your search based on how you’d like the header, navigation, content area, sidebar down to responsiveness of the site’s look and function.

If you prefer to build your site using HTML and CSS code, you can do so. Users can also create their site from a blank template through Jimdo’s custom template builder, located in the editor section under ‘Design; Advanced; Custom Template.’

Changing templates with Jimdo is a pain-free process, as you can swap templates at any time without losing any valuable content.

The Editor

One particularly standout feature of the website builder is its ability to create a website after users answer a few simple questions. You can compare this to the likes of Wix ADI. Similarly to Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence, Jimdo Dolphin enables users to have a personalized website built in a matter of minutes.

In fact, you are immediately given two options upon declaring that you’d like to build a new website. For the purposes of our review, we’ve chosen to build a website using a pre-designed template in order to showcase Jimdo’s features and capabilities.

After choosing the second option ‘Make your own website with Jimdo creator,’ you will be taken to Jimdo’s drag-and-drop editor to begin building your brand new site.

When you enter Jimdo’s editor you will have access to editing a number of important elements of your site. Those elements include, but are not limited to:

Template: Make customizations to your template form the editor, and choose from multiple variations of your template to update your site’s look.Header: Your header is located at the top of your website and is usually where your company logo is placed, along with the company name.Navigation: Change the text and style in your navigation menu. The elements of style you can update include: breadcrumbs, drop-down, slide-in and normal. The navigation menu can also be changed so that it is horizontal or vertical.Content Area: This is the bread and butter of your website, and where you’ll find the majority of your site’s content. Add/remove links, photos, text and more.Sidebar: Your sidebar that you can add elements such as quick links to important dates, content and more. Despite its name, the sidebar can be located on the left, and right-hand side and the bottom as well.Footer: Add/remove footer links (links at the bottom of your site) and hide login links. If you have an online store, place other important links such as links to product pages and special offers.

Element

Features

Text

Add text boxes, change the color of and link text, decide on alignment and elements such as bolding, and editing code directly.

Enable the lightbox feature, which is a design element that displays images and videos in full-screen mode and dims the rest of the webpage.

Jimdo Dolphin

Automatically creates a website by answering a few questions about your business.

Each of Jimdo’s templates is mobile responsive and can be viewed in both standard and the mobile view from the editor section.

Blog Editor

Adding a blog to your Jimdo site can be accomplished from the editor by clicking ‘Blog.’ After this, you can activate your blog and add new posts. Each new post is automatically given a title, date, author name and a comment field. All other elements can be added by clicking ‘Add Elements.’

You will also have the option to:

Categorize your blog

Date your blog

Add a preview image

Include a summary

Publish and unpublish

On the advanced side of editing, users can edit the ending of their blog URLs, add meta tags, enable/disable comments and allow share buttons.

Store

Sell products, both physical and digital when you set up a Jimdo store. From the Store editor, add and arrange products, create product pages, store catalogs and connect PayPal and Stripe accounts to accept payment. From your store you can take the following additional actions:

Create discount codes

Customize shipping costs

Track inventory

This can all be managed from Jimdo’s Mobile App as well.

Mobile Editor

Since each of Jimdo’s templates is mobile responsive, the platform does not offer a mobile editor.

This feature is often hit-or-miss in many cases, as some website builders claim their templates are mobile responsive, yet you still end up spending time making optimizations. Jimdo’s mobile responsive templates are the exact opposite and do a great job at adapting to mobile devices and tablets.

Take a look for yourself.

Jimdo Mobile Apps

With Jimdo’s free iOS app, build, edit and monitor your website while on the go. You can also edit elements of your website on your iPhone or iPad such as photos, text, galleries, pages and blog posts.

Jimdo Mobile App

With Jimdo’s free iOS app, build, edit and monitor your website while on the go. You can also edit elements of your website on your iPhone or iPad such as photos, text, galleries, pages and blog posts.

Jimdo Live Chat for Android

Currently in beta, Jimdo’s Live Chat App for Android users, lets you start a free live chat with your site visitors directly from your phone. The app even enables you to customize the color of the chat interface to resemble your website’s color scheme.

Analytics App

Available for iOS users, keep tabs on site analytics by viewing traffic information and setting up personalized dashboards that provide insight into new and returning visitors, which pages on your site are most popular. Jimdo’s Analytics App does integrate with Google Analytics.

Support

Jimdo’s insightful Support Center, offers various ways to learn how to use the website builder and to take full advantage of its features. There, find FAQs, submit a ticket and a multitude of information on accounts, blogging SEO, domains and more. You can find this information in the form of helpful videos, blog posts and how-to guides.

Hosting/Domain

With the purchase of any Jimdo plan, users receive a free domain for the first year. If you’ve previously purchased a domain, you can connect that to your Jimdo site free of charge. All Jimdo websites include hosting services.

There are some stipulations as to which domains are available for free, so here’s a table that showcases all of the domains included:

.nl

com.mc

.es

co.uk

.it

.com

.pop

.pl

.be

.com.pl

.se

.de

.me

.li

.name

.org

.ch

.net

.info

.eu

.biz

.fr

.at

After taking advantage of a free domain for an entire year, there is a $20 fee for renewal for each year.

Pricing/Plans

Jimdo offers three plans ranging from $7.50/mo to $30/mo. Each plan includes the below base features, and the higher the plan you choose, the more features you gain access to.

Jimdo also has a free account that includes:

A free Jimdo subdomain

500MB of storage

2GB of bandwidth

HTTPS encryption

Free account users can also access Jimdo’s library of templates, add videos, blogs and access Jimdo’s basic features. You do have to upgrade to a premium account if you want to create a custom domain, and not use a Jimdo-branded domain.

In terms of support, Jimdo’s Platinum and Business accounts include Premium Support. Premium and Business accounts enjoy unlimited bandwidth and storage space as well.

You can pay for your Jimdo site using:

American Express

Master Card

PayPal

Visa

Integrations

Jimdo offers integrations in everything from photo and video production with Animoto to infographic design apps with inforgr.am and banner creation with bandcamp.

The following table lists some of Jimdo’s other key integrations:

Integration

Yes/No

Details

Google Analytics

Yes

Implement Google Analytics tracking in order to collect site statistics such as page visits, bounce rate, and referral traffic.

Social Media Share Buttons

Yes

Give website visitors the option to share on Facebook, email, Reddit, Twitter, Eventbrite, LinkedIn and a number of other social media platforms.

Mailbox

Yes

On Pro, Business and Platinum accounts, users can create email accounts that match your domain.

CRM

No

MailChimp

Yes

This service enables you to send an email newsletter to contacts collected on your Jimdo site

3rd Party Reviews

Yes

Through Spectoos, enable testimonials and reviews to show on your site.

Tracking Tools

No

Music

Yes

Jimdo users can upload music from:

SoundCloud

HearThis

PodSnack

BandCamp

Tindeck

8Tracks

Spotify

Video

Yes

Jimdo enables you to add videos from the following sources:

YouTube

Vimeo

MyVideo

DailyMotion

Blip

Sevenload

Metacafe

Clipfish

Veoh

RuTube

Tudou

PayPal

Yes

Accept payments via PayPal, directly from your Jimdo site.

Future Considerations

If you are looking for a website builder with templates that can be built from the ground up — Jimbo is the website builder for you. There are also a ton of other features that set the website builder apart from others. For one, you can change your template at any point without losing important content.

On the other hand, on the off chance things go awry, and content is not backed up, nor is important data such as emails, etc., this could mean bad news. As a response to this, Jimdo offers integrations for migrating large sums of data to your designated cloud storage area for added security.

You should also consider that there is no phone or live support and the minimum amount of time it will take to receive a response, even for the most pressing of issues, is a few hours.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Users can build quickly build a site using Jimdo’s easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop editor.

Access and edit HTML and CSS code directly from the Jimdo editor.

Change your template at any time without losing content.

Cons

Time spent waiting for an answer from customer service can take a few hours, up to a few days depending on your support package. Also, there is no phone or live chat offered.

Limited template selection, in fact, compared to top website builders, Jimdo is very basic in this department.

No CRM tools or integrations.

Websites Built with Jimdo

Bottom Line

Find Out If Jimdo is Right For Your Business

Overall, the platform is intuitive and built so simply that anyone, even those with zero experience in building websites, can build a beautiful site in a matter of hours. Those more experienced in building websites can do so in under an hour if they come prepared with content on hand.

This is one of the platform’s many advantages.

If you are a small to a medium-sized business owner looking to take your business online or even update a clunky old website — know that Jimdo is a great option. This is based on a number of criteria like price, features, integrations and overall potential of ROI. As the platform itself is fairly inexpensive, qualified leads and sales made will more than likely far exceed the cost of using Jimdo.

In the event you want to add a store function to your site, this is even possible, completely eliminating the need for third-party shopping cart experiences.